The
first thing one noticed about this year’s annual conference for the
Center for a New American Security – the
think-tank for the Washington defense and foreign policy establishment
today – is how un-newsworthy it was.

In fact, Google it, and pretty much
nothing comes up.

It might have been planned that way.
The year before, CNAS brought in Gen. David Petraeus as the keynote,
and with him a phalanx of reporters and news cameras. It was the largely
Democratic group’s
third annual conference
and the first since President Barack Obama took office, so the whole
place was high on a great sense of purpose and a righteous mission.
Audaciously appropriating the so-called Petraeus Doctrine – or COIN
strategy – from the outgoing Bush administration, Afghanistan was
theirs
to win.

But a year later, “victory” in
Afghanistan is
more elusive than ever
and the “COINdinistas” are either disappearing to other realms of
pop doctrine or standing around defensively, trying to backtrack and
redefine tactics to accommodate the negative reality on the ground.
So, as last year’s event mimicked the preening confidence of a new
sheriff in town, this year it amounted to a lot of whistling past the
graveyard.

This was the largest congregation of
the uniformed and civilian defense policy establishment all year. CNAS
(pronounced see-nass) had been writing non-stop about Afghanistan
in some capacity since its inception in 2007 – including a recent
study by fellow Andrew Exum, “Leverage:
Designing a Political Campaign for Afghanistan.” The fact that on June 10, the morning of the
conference, one of the major front-page headlines in the Washington
Post blared “Commanders Fear Time Is Running Out in Marja”
should have been the perfect launching point for a stimulating
discussion.

Instead, you had panel after panel nibbling around the edges and a
keynote speech that managed, gratingly, to avoid talking about current
operations altogether. Indirectly, the day provided a few tiny glimpses
into how the COIN community and all of its defense industry hangers-on
are feeling about the state of things. And it is not good.
Unfortunately for them, the lack of public candor just added to the growing sense of doom.

What a difference a year makes.

First, there was Tom Ricks, COIN
hagiographer
and CNAS fellow, who promoted the CNAS confab on his Foreign
Policy blog as follows:

“This afternoon I’ll be at the
annual CNAS
policy hoedown.
We will decide, among other things, whether COIN is last year’s flavor
or simply the beginning of a new era of warefare [sic], as for example
Mexican drug cartels erode national security on our southwestern
border.”

And Ricks, as usual, didn’t get
it right. They didn’t “decide, among other things, whether COIN
is last year’s flavor”; they didn’t talk about that at all.

In fact, the first panel, “Future of the Force,” for which Ricks
moderated, turned out to be a mishmash of topics, from robotics to the
use of private contractors in-theater – but no frank dialogue on
whether our forces could handle another two years of war, or whether
the drive toward COIN within the force structure today was even
working.

Instead, Adm. Eric Olson,
commander of U.S. Special Operations, who in other venues has taken to
criticizing COIN directly (he’s gone so far as to say COIN is “an imperfect template
from which we must deviate”]
pulled his punches. After giving a brief history of Special Operations
Command (SOCOM), he said virtually nothing. When asked a round robin
of “what is your greatest fear about the future of the force?” he
suggested cryptically without follow-up, “COIN without counterterrorism
is the wrong strategy” that “COIN is local” and should be used
by individual Special Forces units as they see fit.

Then, CNAS President John
Nagl, who has been called
the “Johnny
Appleseed of COIN,” chimed
in with this nugget: COIN was
indeed not meant for widespread use by “general purpose forces,”
and though forces “have to have a better capability for COIN” our
“foreign policy should be designed so that situations don’t reach
that level.”

Huh? This is the guy who spent the
last two years championing COIN against conventional warfare like it
was the civil rights movement of the military. There wasn’t room for
such nuance before. When asked what his “greatest fear” was, John “Learning
to Eat Soup
with a Knife”
Nagl proceeded to talk about a “great level of vulnerability … where
your adversary is not clearly defined … no good and bad guys and shades
of gray … [we] don’t have the local knowledge about the culture and
political relationships.” Whoa, things aren’t going so well; please
explain – but the conversation went nowhere.

Then, the Brookings Institution’s
Peter Singer, typically a smart military critic, said his greatest fear
is that “Afghanistan becomes our Boer War.” Wow. This is one that
has been floated around lately, but it’s a bold statement nonetheless –
comparing our involvement in Central Asia to the long British
“counterinsurgency” campaign in South Africa that symbolizes,
for many, the end of Britain as an unquestioned global superpower. And
at a CNAS convocation no less. But if this was bait, no one here was
biting. The discussion quickly shifted to Q & A, and with a crowd
of mostly contractors, wonks, and uniforms, that became just as
snooze-worthy
as the preceding hour.

“As a journalist, could they
have made this any more difficult to cover?” asked one national security
writer, after the next frustrating panel discussion. The topic’s title,
“America’s Enduring Interests in Central and South Asia,” certainly
held promise. Finally an honest, unavoidable crack at Marjah, Kandahar,
and the amazing Karzai brothers. Instead, half the time was sucked up
with a game: pretend it is 2013 and you are briefing the president
on the “current” situation in the so-called Af-Pak region.

This made for a lot of tedious wishful
thinking, gentle scolding of the Obama administration, and
a regurgitation of the unrealistic goals already set by today’s most
conventional establishment thinkers. In the way that the last
administration’s
neoconservative surrogates took the bone of war and refused to give
it up, many of the COINdinistas represented here clearly believe the
Obama administration was foolish to establish a timeline for withdrawal
(July 2011), and they subtly blame any current or future failures on
that “premature” announcement.

“We have to think long term,” said
Ryan Crocker, former ambassador to Iraq under President Bush, who
predicted
in his imaginary briefing to the president that things improved
in Afghanistan when “they finessed the 2011 withdrawal date.”

Retired Lt. Gen. David Barno, COIN
adherent and senior CNAS adviser, (yes, that
Barno), was less
optimistic.
He predicted that the “beginning of the end of the U.S. commitment” was
the declaration of withdrawal, which “inadvertently reinforced the [Taliban] strategy” to “run out the clock” on the U.S.
and began the “breakdown of trust” between the people and the U.S.-backed
Afghan government. As a result, the Taliban “simply chose to melt
back into the shadows” to fight another day.

Scanning the blue-suited, uniformed
crowd at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel, a swanky Washington
institution
a stone’s throw from the White House, it was clear this was the message
they wanted to hear: that the U.S. must dig in stubbornly for the long
haul. Privately, they may say otherwise; as a retired military colonel
and prominent analyst told me in the hallway, “Afghanistan is no longer
strategically important to us.”

Refreshingly, CNAS didn’t forget
its stated obligation to try and appear open-minded, so it let at least
one heretic into the proceedings. Last
year, Andrew Bacevich played the role.
On Thursday, Paul
Pillar, the former CIA
officer and Army veteran who has been crossing the conventional wisdom
about preemptive war and the counter-terror operations abroad since
the Bush administration, was the skunk at the tea party.

“The presence of the U.S. in the theater
… has continued to be a stimulus for radicalism,” the Georgetown
University professor intoned without hesitation in his 2013 briefing
to the president. But unlike Bacevich’s critique, which prompted
a touchy defense of COIN by Andrew Exum last year, Pillar’s blasphemy
was met with relative silence.

Should have some pretty neat insights,
right? Wrong. Her talk was an exercise in caution that went beyond much
of the milquetoast analyses the audience had endured thus far. It was
terribly boring. When she wasn’t meandering into the weeds of the
defense bureaucracy (“at the DoD we have begun to make some real
progress
in our 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review”), she was channeling Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton in her prosaic speech about the new National
Security Strategy two weeks ago (“we have been able to craft a
principled
and pragmatic approach”). She indulged in tedious clichés (“we
will need the agility of David, not the clumsiness of Goliath”), and
when pressed on more provocative issues during the Q&A, she
answered
like a coached witness on the stand (“we have a deep and abiding
interest
in Israel’s security … and that is not going to change anytime soon”).

Funny – CNAS, led by Flournoy, became
an early interlocutor between the Obama administration and the military
and was a principal driver of the COIN doctrine, yet Flournoy spent
not more than a minute talking about Afghanistan, or even Iraq, which
supposedly was a key success for COIN under CNAS favorite Gen. David
Petraeus. Her remarks seemed deliberately broad and ponderous – and
all in industry-speak, almost as if addressed to staff rather than a
broader Washington audience.

Perhaps that was the point. Many of the
people in that room were more concerned with self-preservation than
with getting to the bottom of what went wrong in Afghanistan. They wanted
to be assured that the wheels of war were still turning, and for the
most part, they got what they came for.

So, head down, whistle high, past the
graveyard and smack into another one. Glad to see the Washington
establishment
is as predictable as ever.

The sad thing is that there is no learning curve. Failure is not an option because as soon as it occurs it is forgotten and they move on to the new "concept." What kind of disaster has to take place before the E-ringers and their counterparts in the White House figure out that it is the whole foreign and security policy that stinks? Kudos to Kelley for enduring a whole day listening to those a-holes.

Failure is only meaningful if there are consequences attached. These 'specialists' or 'analysts' or what have you by and large don't have to suffer any kind of consequence for whatever flavor of the month the they happen to be pimping. If it doesn't work out then they shrug and move on to another 'concept' or 'idea' oblivious to the fact that some of what they helped sell may have had deadly consequences for people half a world away.

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, a Washington, D.C.-based freelance writer, is a longtime
political reporter for FoxNews.com and
a contributing editor at The American Conservative.
She is also a Washington correspondent for Homeland Security Today magazine. Her Twitter account is @KelleyBVlahos.